


so long, we become the flowers

by yosef_the_tycoon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Awesome Morgana (Merlin), BAMF Morgana (Merlin), Character Study, Dark Morgana (Merlin), Evil Morgana (Merlin), Gen, Minor Gwen/Morgana (Merlin), POV Morgana (Merlin), basically it's about my girl morgana, i guess, if you couldn't tell, like a kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24155308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosef_the_tycoon/pseuds/yosef_the_tycoon
Summary: Some women are filled with all the rage of their ancestors. The rage of a thousand women, beaten and downtrodden and sidelined.And if raging at the blood of thousands of innocents is evil, then so be it. If evil is the fearless rebellion of a people long isolated and killed, just for being, then so be it.She would do what she had to do.Sometimes she thinks about the person she had been. The faded spirit she had been, held in by the stone walls that her ancestors built.Instead, she learned to feel the spirit of the stones she walked upon.
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> soo I found these little character studies I wrote while I watched merlin for the first time like a year ago. thought I'd upload them and see what happens

Some women were filled with all the rage of their ancestors. The rage of a thousand women, beaten and downtrodden and sidelined.

Complacency was key. To keeping a woman happy with her lot. Happy to live in a house with one man rather than out there, where there were so many. As long as women were silent, and self-ignorant, and complacent, men could keep their rule while some invisible ghost ran the house.

Her father had been a distant man, her mother troubled. She had been a powerful woman, at some point - a high priestess of the old religion. But the short years Morgana had spent with her, she preferred not to think about. She was a husk of a woman, the kind with fractured eyes and an oscillating countenance.

She had only fond memories of Gorlois, but they were few and far between. Not like her memories of Uther.

He once told her that she had fought him from the beginning, and she had. Even when she loved him most, she couldn't help but wonder if he truly had intended to have her father killed - especially once she found out her true heritage. He had a spirit as fiery as her own, but she was young. His tender speeches ensured her loyalty, even after long rages of passion or acts of malicious intent.

She knew deep down that he was a cruel man. Sometimes the things he said and did sounded like they came from another man's mouth, not the kind and gentle person she came to know and love as a father. She knew from the instant she arrived that Arthur shared this - his misplaced rage and aggression.

Perhaps she was not usually subject to it - and she preferred to forget about the times she was - but a part of her remained fearful. A larger part grew to be like them.

She was raised by knights and swordfighting in the woods. A tomboy, they said. How shall she ever find a husband?

They way was barred to her.

She could fight better than Arthur himself, speak more languages, ride faster, dance better, hold court, slay a dragon, become a scholar.

It didn't matter.

Even when she became beautiful, she did not intend to marry. That didn't help her, not with all the things she wanted to do. Instead, she learned how to be queen. She could be subtle, too, as she sat by Uther's side. She learned to suppress the brashness of her youth. To speak more softly, and to let the maids braid her hair, and to smile sweetly.

Perhaps the only thing she learned indoors was how to lie.

She was good at lying, always.

She watched execution after execution, sometimes in her nightmares - before they happened. She didn't dare follow the niggling thoughts in her brain as she made winds blow or saw things that hadn't yet happened. She couldn't.

She just smiled benignly as the axe fell, and couldn't explain why it hurt her too.

Her childhood was plagued with nightmares and sleeping draughts. A cycle that spun on and on until she was a woman that couldn't sleep without the heaviest doses, and even then, barely.

Loneliness is a terrible thing.

To be surrounded with people, yet to lie and be lied to all day. She was not a liar by nature. In fact, she had been the most compassionate of children. The kind to cry at a squashed spider, or a wounded bunny. But it felt as though she was lying - mostly to herself.

When she sat across from Uther and believed that she loved him, and that he truly loved her. When she held court for strangers as they discussed the plague of magic - and hosting and holding court was something she was good at, enjoyed even. When she smiled and curtsied and laughed and joked and loved and cried.

Because it all felt so little.

As though she should be wild on the moors. As though something had to snap inside her before she could stop feeling like a liar. Until she could feel the grass beneath her toes, and smell the forest in her nose, and felt the wind in her hair.

Women are not made to be complacent, or kept indoors, or silence their rage. They are not made for little thrones, to watch over little people living their little lives. Now while men played at being some imitation God. 

They are made stronger than men, and to be freer than men.

So it was with all the rage of a thousand women that Morgana let herself break into a thousand pieces. Still trying to be good, and less alone. But free, this time. And wild as the spirits of women before her.


	2. Chapter 2

The man she had considered a friend had lied to her almost every day. For years. He gave her potions and kind words, not saying anything as her mind crumbled and her sleep ceased.

The only father she had ever known was a tyrant. His soft words sated her anger at the injustice - and when he chained her up or threw her into walls. They couldn't quell it for long, not when he tried to kill the druid boy. Not when she at last found peace, and his harsh orders decimated it along with a hundred kind elders.

But the serving boy, she had trusted him. She knew he lied, and knew more about magic than he let on. But he was kind, and open, and he had always been good to her.

He tried to kill her.

She tried to rationalise it, long after Morgause had told her not to give it further thought. How? How could he have done that?

She could trust no more.

She didn't trust Morgause, not in the way she had her old family. She was sceptical of her methods, her darkness. But she was the only person to truly care. To take her hand and show her the beautiful pathways hidden from view, to catch her and guide her.

To whisper the secrets of the distant moon and translate the rush of waters. To show her how a carcass could be beautiful and how the scream of a banshee could be enchanting. 

They spent much time moving.

She had not been naïve to the King's policies. They made her sick. But to see it? That was something else.

She saw village after village torn apart and burned. Children and mothers and fathers and workers and families. Crushed under his iron fist like dust.

The power inside her grew with her anger, honed by her sister's tutelige.

She had to destroy him. Camelot, her home, had to go. The old regime was no good, and only a brand new one could rectify his sins. Her brother, the servant boy, her father. Her best friend.

They could mean nothing.

If she was to right the wrongs of old, she couldn't leave her heart in the past.

It hurt to think too long about her maiden and friend. The way she smiled, and laughed, and cried. The nights they spent together when she was too afraid to sleep, and her friend was too good to leave. As long as she didn't think about her, she could leave her out of their plots and plans.

She had spent her whole lives behind castles and walls. Inside, smiling and waving and gently laughing. She had not realised how infuriating it all was.

Now, the winds rushed through her hair and she felt the soft earth at her feet. Fire rushed through her veins and she felt her spirit magnified by all the rivers in the land. To destroy as she had been destroyed was a novel feeling.

And perhaps she revelled in it all.


	3. Chapter 3

With her sister went her resolve.

She would do what she had to do. She became more determined to become queen, that much was true. It was her singular purpose, and she would fulfill it.

But there was little else.

Years of pain at the hands of the Pendragons had built and built. She had told Arthur many times that he was a better man than his father.

She had been wrong.

She had always known she must be the one to sit on the throne, but she had wondered if her brother could change things too. It became clear that his heart was as black as his father's, and his hands would soon be as bloodstained.

Still, a wave of despair settled over her. It would not stop her. Rather, it would drive her.

She had allies in the shadowy corners of the Kingdom. People who remembered the old ways, or looked to her as the last high priestess. She saw her sister in them, and sought guidance.

Her nightmares returned.

The healing bracelet brought her immense relief, but fate could not be stopped. The things still revealed to her were surely too important to be stopped by the bracelet.

She lived her days in fear of him. Emerys. Irrational. She saw him at night, and once in her home. The hovel where she was left alone to her thoughts.

Her thoughts fractured her own mind. They drove her forward.

In the old days, sweet Guenevere would be subject to those intrusive thoughts and disturbing dreams. She would lay a cool cloth on her forehead with a sweet smile and hold her hand until she felt calm again.

These days it was imperative that she did not restrain herself.

And she refused herself thoughts of that serving girl. She could not do what needed to be done if she remembered.


	4. Chapter 4

Sometimes she thinks about the person she had been. The faded spirit she had been, held in by the stone walls that her ancestors built.

Instead, she learned to feel the spirit of the stones she walked upon.

But she spends two years in darkness, trapped by stone walls smaller than she had ever known. She had only a broken dragon to keep her company.

With those eons of darkness, the faded spirit of the girl she had been falls away. She thinks perhaps that she spends so long in the darkness that is becomes a part of her.

Even after she escapes, even after she has convinced herself that the sun she can feel again is the same as the one she had said goodbye to all those years ago, she seeks out darkness. She makes her homes in cobwebbed castles, surrounding herself with ice and endless jungle.

She would not be alive if it wasn't for Arthur - for her unerring, enduring hatred for him. Why, when he had so much blood on his hands, did he live fully and free while she felt herself dying in a pit?

She does not kill him.

Perhaps it's the faded spirit of the girl, reminding her that she used to feel things. It doesn't matter why, but she cannot kill him.

She watches the only son she's ever known - her kindred spirit - run him through with a blade forged in the breath of her broken dragon. The dragon is all she has left, and Emerys - Merlin, the serving boy that let her break all those years ago - drives even her away.

She lets out a banshee scream over Mordred's body. She is his only mourner - the blood of his kind finally avenged by his blade. She lets herself cry alone at his grave, that pile of rocks marked only by the chipped sword that killed Arthur Pendragon.

She thinks she'll watch him die. She hopes to.

But Emerys - Merlin - is her undoing. Just as he was always destined to be.

She dies alone, choking out her final breath with only Emerys and her not-dead brother to bear witness. There is no one to scream over her body, no one to weep at her grave.

But she dies in the woods, and she swears that the spirits of the trees and the sky are there to watch. That they take her soul back into the earth where it has always belonged.


End file.
